Early in 2020, Sridhar began formally advising the Scottish and United Kingdom governments and the Wellcome Trust, a London-based charitable foundation focused on health research. This year, she was named vice-chair of a pandemic advisory group under the auspices of the U.S.-based National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

She also has written a regular column for The Guardian, contributed to The New York Times, and appeared frequently on news shows on the BBC. When Scotland’s national academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, honored her as a 2021 Fellow last March, it called her a “public health expert” who during the pandemic had become a “household name.”

“Devi is clearly a shining light … taking this field to a higher level, and very much in time,” said Julio Frenk, the president of the University of Miami and former Minister of Health for Mexico. “This pandemic – which makes every previous pandemic in the last century pale by comparison – has only underscored the importance of global health … It’s people like Devi who are going to move the agenda forward and, in the end, create not just a healthier, but also a safer world for everyone.”

Frenk, 67, knows Sridhar as more than an alumna of the school he now leads. The two are longtime colleagues and collaborators; Sridhar was the lead author on a peer-reviewed scientific paper on global health with Frenk and two others published a year before he arrived to Miami in 2015.

Formerly a public health professor at Harvard University, Frenk recalls meeting Sridhar, then a lecturer at Oxford University, at an international conference on global health when she was in her 20s.

“She was brilliant and incredibly articulate,” he said by phone this summer. “She is still very young, but she was even younger then, so I immediately saw in her the face of the next generation of leaders in global health. She’s come not only to fulfill that impression, but actually surpass it many times over.”

 

The issue of public health has been personal for Sridhar since her days at Ransom Everglades, when her father, Kasi Sridhar – who had dedicated his life to saving lives as a lung cancer researcher at the University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center – battled leukemia and lymphoma.

He received his diagnosis shortly after Devi started ninth grade and, despite a valiant fight, died three months after she graduated in May 2001. He left behind five children, including four who attended Ransom Everglades (Divya Sridhar ’99, Devi, Jay Sridhar ’05 and Priya Sridhar ’09) and his wife, Leela Sridhar, a pediatrician.

“I was super-close to my dad,” Devi said. “He wasn’t unwell the whole time, but it went into remission and came back my senior year. It was a horrible time. My senior year was such a mix. You had all of the celebrations and graduation, but at the same time my dad was really ill. He was in the hospital getting heavy chemo. It was really, really hard, one of the toughest times of my life.”

Watching her father as a patient, rather than a doctor, fueled her interest in public health. She began to understand that good health represented true wealth, the ultimate advantage in life. She wanted to work to ensure everyone had that advantage.

“Being healthy is invaluable,” she said. “If you’re in chronic pain, or going through chemo, the suffering affects every day of your life. When you see it up close, you just realize that health is such an asset, a resource.”

She recalls her time on RE’s tennis courts providing a much-needed distraction from the pain of that period, helping to keep her active and her spirits up. She landed on a historically spectacular team that was led by Megan Bradley Rose ’01 and Amanda Saiontz Gluck ’03, both of whom played collegiate tennis (Bradley Rose also played professionally and was inducted into the RE Athletics Hall of Fame in 2009). During her senior year, the girls won a state tennis championship.

“I tagged along,” Sridhar said, laughing. “I managed to make the team. I mean, this wasn’t your average high school team, let’s just say that. You had strong players. I was like fifth or sixth on the team. I was just happy to be along, be part of the team, and to play wherever I could."

She found another outlet in her classes, particularly those in the humanities. The University of Miami’s fast-track bachelor’s degree program in medicine offered little time for exploration outside of traditional STEM fields. She credits Ransom Everglades with providing an outstanding foundation in English and writing, which she relies upon to this day. She insists she wasn’t an academic superstar. “The classes were tough – I was always a good student, but I was never the best,” she said.

Former RE English teacher Diane Goodman, now a professor at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, begs to differ. Sridhar remembers Goodman as one of her favorite teachers. Goodman, who also taught at the University of Miami, remembers Sridhar as her top student – at any level, high school or college.

“Devi was probably the best student I ever had, and I had wonderful students over the years,” Goodman said by phone. “Even as a young person, she was a brilliant and completely devoted student. She was deeply and genuinely interested in all subjects.”

 

After sailing through the honors program at UM, Sridhar applied to medical schools, preparing to follow in her parents’ footsteps. Her honors advisor urged her to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, which she did, an attempt she described as a “fluke,” a shot in the dark. She had no expectation of winning such a prestigious honor. When she became the youngest person from the United States ever selected for the Rhodes, and one of only 32 scholars in 2012, she put her plans for med school on permanent hold. 

“It was,” she said, “like winning the lottery.”

The academic windfall changed the course of her life. Suddenly, the opportunity to do meaningful research opened to her. She flew to Oxford University, wide-eyed, excited to start a new chapter. She wore flip-flops and a cardigan. When she landed in London, she was prepared for the academic journey ahead, and wholly unprepared for the weather.

“It took me a few months to realize, you need a coat, you need a hat, you need boots, you need gloves, you need a scarf, you need to wear layers,” she said. “I was very Miami.”

She was soon off to India to commence on-the-ground research on the nation’s hunger crisis. She looks back at that time with some amazement. Driven by eagerness and not a little bit of naiveté, she traveled largely by herself, determined to learn about the plight of the most impoverished families in the country her parents had been born – a topic that would become the subject of her doctorate and first book.

“I just wanted to understand and spend time in India,” she said. “When I think back to some of the stuff I did; I mean, I walked into slums and was walking around on my own … I was – looking back – quite fearless. I was just taking the plunge and trying to understand.”

 

By the time she was 22, she had finished her PhD. At 23, she assumed a research post at Oxford and published The Battle Against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance, and the World Bank. It was about that time that she met Chelsea Clinton, who was researching HIV/AIDs for her doctorate, and working to set up The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The pair found their research complementary and – as Clinton was just a few years older than Sridhar – they became fast friends.

They eventually collaborated on a book, Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?, that was published in 2017. Their work, formulated in the aftermath of the Ebola crisis, discussed pandemic preparedness and sounded an alarm about future infectious diseases while emphasizing the importance of global collaboration. Clinton credited Sridhar with the ability to translate complex public health challenges into plain language – making it easier for lay people to understand, and inspiring public officials to action.

“I have seen her do this repeatedly throughout her career, including in our work together,” Clinton wrote in an email. “It’s been a privilege to work with and learn from her. And, she’s an excellent friend!”

While she and Clinton were finishing the book, Sridhar was offered a faculty position at Oxford, then lured to Scotland, where she became the founding Director of the Global Health Governance Programme at Edinburgh. In that role, she oversees post-docs, researchers, PhD candidates and medical students, and also teaches a course, Investing in Global Health, to students in the university’s master’s program. Her research team is engaged in health issues around the globe, yet when COVID-19 hit, it was Sridhar who took the lead.

“Devi stepped up very early,” said Linda Bauld, a professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh. “She realized far earlier than I, and many of my colleagues: this was going to be something we had not seen in our lifetimes.”

The pace for the next 18 months was dizzying; the one thing Sridhar sacrificed, she said, was sleep. “I guess it’s my personality: full on,” she said. “I’m full on into my work. It’s just about being in the moment. If I’m writing something, I try to focus on it; if I’m talking to you, I try to focus on it; if I’m doing my exercise, I focus on it. I think that helps with the mental overload. That helps each day come together.”

 

Despite her fast ascent in her field, Bauld said, Sridhar has remained grounded, winning admirers by displaying an uncommon dignity and humility.

“She’s genuinely collaborative,” Bauld said. “She’s built an excellent team around her, and works across disciplines … She’s got a strong sense of self and identity that has allowed her – even though she’s so young – to be a leader. She’s a leader that takes people with her … She doesn’t have the arrogance that we see so often in our field, and many fields.”

Sridhar, who is writing a book on the pandemic that will be released next year, said she would encourage current Ransom Everglades students to ignore traditional notions of success as they consider life after high school.

“You should do what makes you happy, and what you can make a career out of – not what you are expected to do,” she said. “The people I’ve met who have really changed the world and are happy, are people who have kind of aligned what they’re good at, what they like doing, and what the world needs. Find those three things, and chart your own path.”

Frenk, the University of Miami president, confessed that he hoped Sridhar would chart her path back to Miami. He admitted that one of his first moves when he assumed the presidency in 2015 was to try to coax her onto UM’s faculty.

“I am still keeping my fingers crossed that she will come back one day and teach and be an academic leader on this side of the ocean,” Frenk said, laughing. “I don’t lose hope.”

For now, Sridhar is happy in Edinburgh. 

The city, she said, is just like Miami. Except for the sheep. And a few other things.

“I always joke about Edinburgh being the Miami of the North,” she said. “We have amazing beaches. We have surfing. There’s stand-up paddle boarding ... We just don’t have the weather.”